


heart like a wheel

by bananakarenina



Series: her hair was red [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: 1970s, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Gen, Motherhood, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:16:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29932617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananakarenina/pseuds/bananakarenina
Summary: It starts at a family--well, Leonard's family—dinner. Nora attributes the late-night nausea to Leonard's mother's ham and tuna casserole (she’s been married to Len Peters for three years now and still not used to the taste), so that night she goes to bed early. She’s fine the next morning, maybe a little tired, but the nausea surges again late in the evening and keeps up every night thereafter, worry rising in her along with the bile.An exploration of late 1970s motherhood through Sunset Curve's mothers. Also an excuse to use 70s women singer-songwriters and their lyrics for fic titles, haha. Part 1: Nora Peters, 1977.
Series: her hair was red [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2201343
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	heart like a wheel

**Author's Note:**

> Whoooooo. I've been working on this for MONTHS now and I really wanted to post it in time for International Women's Day. Parts 2 & 3 (Alex & Luke's moms) will be up probably by Women's Day next year at this rate, lol. 
> 
> Title from Linda Ronstadt's "Heart Like A Wheel". Series title from Emmylou Harris' "Her Hair Was Red":
> 
> You wouldn't know she traveled far and wide  
> You wouldn't know she lived here all her life  
> There is so much you'll never know about her  
> So much left to say that's left unsaid
> 
> But I have got this picture in my memory  
> And her eyes are blue, her hair is red

heart like a wheel

_Dallas, 1977_

It starts at a family--well, Leonard's family—dinner. Nora attributes the late-night nausea to Leonard's mother's ham and tuna casserole (she’s been married to Len Peters for three years now and _still_ not used to the taste), so that night she goes to bed early. She’s fine the next morning, maybe a little tired, but the nausea surges again late in the evening and keeps up every night thereafter, worry rising in her along with the bile.

Len, besides commenting on how long her bedtime routine takes nowadays, never notices anything is wrong.

For the next six nights she vomits at ten-fifteen sharp and falls asleep after. On the morning of the seventh day, she waits until Len goes to work and gets out the Rolodex her sister had bought her as a wedding present (“for all the people you’ll meet in Dallas, and for all the people you need to write back home in Abilene!”), rifling through to the Es, searching for her doctor’s card.

She knows about the new at-home tests, of course. Susanna Rogers at church had mentioned—bragged about—hers, simpering that it was such a _blessing_ to know early that she was expecting, that the ten dollars for the at-home kit was just so _worth_ it to know, don’t you think so, Nora, and Nora had screwed on her best know-nothing smile and said “bless your heart, Susanna, spoiling your baby already!” with a very subtle emphasis on _spoil_ that she knew Susanna missed.

Ten dollars. Ten whole dollars. That’s Nora’s grocery bill for a week—she couldn’t go spending it on what sounded to her like a fancy chemistry kit involving sheep’s blood. Plus the credit card was in Len’s name and he always went over the statement with a fine-tooth comb, fretting about pennies, always thinking about saving for some far-off rainy day. As for cash, it was always limited; Nora always had a few dollars of spending money but ten was pushing it.

But Leonard, now an insurance salesman, did buy the two of them very good health insurance with low copayments. So she pulls Doctor Gregory Elliott’s card out of her Rolodex—he had done her very first gynecologic exam before her wedding and had been kind enough that she had returned for her annuals.

She’s lucky enough that he can squeeze her in at the end of the week. When Friday finally arrives, she takes two buses to the appointment and sits in the waiting room silently, looking at the other women there like maybe she could tell just by their faces if they were as unsure about their life choices as she was.

Dr. Elliott says, “we just need to collect the specimen in this cup, please” and “would you like to sit in the waiting room until the results come back, or go home and wait for a phone call?” and finally “congratulations, Mrs. Peters,” and Nora says, “are you sure?”

Dr. Elliott is a bit taken aback; clearly he’s not expecting her reaction. “Yes, the tests we use in our office are very reliable. More reliable than the new at-home tests, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

That’s not what she was wondering, but she doesn’t say anything else.

She knows there are clinics for girls in trouble; the Supreme Court decision had rocked Dallas just a few years ago, the district attorney at the center. Nora remembers the newspaper headlines—MOTHER KNOWS BEST—and she remembers visiting her cousin Lisa at Southern Methodist University and walking past a crowd of women with picket signs reading KEEP ABORTION LEGAL and MY BODY MY CHOICE. Lisa had sniffed at them, muttering something about murder, and Nora had shuddered at the coat hangers the women had held up in raised fists. She didn’t really know what the coat hangers were supposed to be for, but she couldn’t imagine it was for anything good. And now there are news stories about that poor girl from McAllen who died last month because she couldn’t afford to go to a real clinic and went to a back-alley butcher instead.

Nora knows now that she’s led a sheltered life. She knows she wouldn’t know the difference between the two either.

Nora Peters is a married woman, though. She’s not a girl in trouble. So the point is moot.

She loves Len. She really does—or she thought she did, anyway. They had a whirlwind romance, back when Len was a whirlwind.

In the spring of 1974 she was barely twenty years old, a small-town girl from the outskirts of Abilene, Cher-black hair all the way down her back, visiting Lisa at college so they could go to the Dallas nightclubs with no supervision. Len was a wild-haired, boyishly-handsome SMU senior with a wide, easy grin who could tear it up on the dance floor. She can still remember the alley outside the Silver Lady where they first met, the precise way she fitted her lips around the cigarette he offered her, how his hand felt so warm on the small of her back, how when he looked at her the bass from the dance floor speakers felt like her own heartbeat.

She visited Lisa at least six more times that spring and summer; they’d all go to the Silver Lady or another club on Saturday night, but the rest of the weekend she and Len would wander SMU’s campus and find the best hidden (and not-so-hidden) places to make out, or they’d hole up with Len at his apartment, playing house, playing pranks, and fooling around (of course).

One Friday in June she helped him rearrange the entire place to be a funhouse mirror of itself: dining room table, complete with place settings, in his roommate’s room, the sofa and coffee table in his own bedroom, and it had paid off when his roommate stumbled home at 2am drunk as hell and shouting fearfully “where am I? where am I?”

They had fallen into bed (well, the sofa) laughing, and Nora thought, maybe this forever.

And then Len said, “I could do this forever,” and Nora’s smile almost split her face.

“Let’s do this forever, then,” she said.

She always was a little too impulsive for anyone’s good.

They married in the summer, after Len graduated, and after the small reception was over they went into the city and Len twirled her in her white dress to a chorus of cheers on the Silver Lady dance floor.

Their honeymoon was spent over the Oklahoma border at Turner Falls, where Nora convinced Len to go skinny dipping when the sun was low and the tourists were gone (it didn't take much convincing; all she had to do was untie her halter top). A sunburned week later they drove back with the windows rolled down, skipping between country stations on the radio, singing along at the top of their lungs.

For that first year, things were perfect. Len got a job at a hole-in-wall pizzeria, and he’d come home smelling like warm dough and garlic, and when she’d kiss him his mouth was sweet like tomatoes, and it was the best thing she ever tasted. Sometimes when they needed extra help, the owners would ask her to wait tables in the small dining room, and Len would wink at her all night from the kitchen. Any customer in the vicinity usually loved it; Nora would say, “that’s my husband,” and the ladies would coo while the men shook their heads good-naturedly.

They scraped by on tips and kitchen wages, but as long as Nora didn't give into her impulses to buy too many sweets in the checkout line it was enough. 

She thinks it may have been the happiest year of her life.

Things started to change after a Peters family dinner late in 1975.

“Leonard. When are you going to grow the hell up?” his father had boomed from the head of the table, not even waiting for the meatloaf to be served.

The room went so, so quiet; Len’s mother stood with the knife in a white-knuckle grip, mid-slice. Her lips were pressed together so thin that Nora almost winced in sympathy. Len let out a long breath through his nose, but his father wasn’t done yet.

“Slinging _pizza_ like you’re still a boy. What’s next, a paper route? What was that college tuition even for?”

“Dad—”

“You have a wife to support now.”

“He supports his wife just fine,” Nora heard herself say, and her father-in-law had looked at her with such condescension that it felt like she’d been slapped.

“Leonard. Your uncle needs a new agent at the insurance company. I told him you’d call him this week,” he’d said, in a tone that brooked no discussion.

And there was none. They ate dinner in silence that night and Len drove home to their little apartment in silence too.

“We’re doing okay, Len,” she ventured late that night, in the dark of their room. “You support me just fine.”

“No. He’s right, Nora—you want to keep living like this forever?”

“Well, yes,” she had said, because it was true; she did.

She wishes now she had said _Screw that bastard, I love our life and I love you._

He called his uncle a week later—technically within the timeline his father had set—and his first day at the insurance company was the week after that. The pizzeria owners were sad to see him go; he was their best chef and made them laugh to boot.

The changes came slowly. A couple of secondhand sport coats appeared in Len’s closet, then the next week came a request for her to iron his best collared shirts. A few months later he was circling rental notices and real estate listings because he felt their current neighborhood wasn’t low enough on the crime rate rankings.

He still put LPs on their hand-me-down record changer and danced with her in their new living room, though, so Nora thought it was fine. His eyes still sparkled green when she kissed him.

But her Len slowly became An Insurance Man. She fell in love with the guy with the wild hair who made love to her on a sofa for an entire weekend because he was so committed to pranking his best friend, the guy who held her hand while she got her left ear triple-pierced and told her it looked sexy, the guy who sometimes toked up late at night and talked too much about the universe. Now, three years later, she lives with Leonard Peters, of Peters Insurance, who doesn’t even go five over the speed limit. 

“I miss you,” she had blurted once, and Len had looked up at her.

“I’m right here,” he said, giving her a sweet, confused smile.

She didn’t say it again.

It’s a full two weeks after her appointment before Len finds out. He’s filtering through the day’s mail, and there’s an envelope marked Explanation of Benefits addressed to Leonard Peters, Account Holder. He opens it and scans it carefully, as he does with all official mail nowadays, and Nora knows the second he sees the line in question because his eyes go comically—adorably—wide.

“Nora? Is it—I mean. Are you—?” 

She can’t do anything but nod, her heart in her throat, and there’s a hysterical moment where she expects him to start quoting the insurance costs of birth and whether their beat-up Oldsmobile is rated for the best car seats, and she just doesn't think she can handle that right now. 

But he doesn't, thank God. He leaps out of his chair and spins her around, and for one heady moment it's like she’s back on the Silver Lady dance floor.

“A baby!” he shouts, and she can’t help but laugh. “Little Reginald Peters.”

“Reginald?” she asks. 

“Don’t you remember? The DJ at the Silver Lady. He was spinning the night we met. RR King—his real name is Reginald Washington. ” 

“What a name to call a baby,” Nora says, but she’s smiling. _She_ didn’t even remember the DJ's name, to be truthful. "And what if it's a girl?"

He looks at her like she's truly dense. "Linda, of course. For Ronstadt. She's your favorite."

There he is, Nora thinks. There’s my Len.

She stands there for a second, bowled over, and kisses him so soundly he sways on his feet, and he doesn’t even bring up moving to yet another neighborhood until the next morning (“Reginald will need a bigger yard to play in! But absolutely no trampolines!”) so Nora calls it a win.

As Len holds her in the living room lamplight, she thinks: okay. She can do this. If she can just string together moments like this for the rest of their lives, she thinks they’ll be all right.

There’s enough love here for that.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: 
> 
> Pregnancy tests in 1977 were not the dipstick style you may be familiar with (apparently not invented until the 80s!) Instead they involved vials of purified water, angled mirrors, and yes, sheep’s blood. They did run about $10 per. More here, including a picture: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-first-home-pregnancy-test-looked-180955478/
> 
> Ten dollars in 1977 is about $42-43 in today’s money, so definitely a decent chunk of change if you’re saving pennies like Nora and Len. Meanwhile, an abortion procedure at a freestanding clinic ran about $150 (about $650 in today’s dollars), and more if you went to a hospital. 
> 
> The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974, which granted women the right to obtain a credit card separate from their husbands. 
> 
> The “big Supreme Court case” Nora references is Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that protected a pregnant person’s right to choose to have an abortion. The Wade half of the case was Henry Wade, district attorney of Dallas from 1951 to 1987. 
> 
> Coat hangers are a symbol used by pro-choice and pro-abortion activists to represent the pre-Roe abortion landscape and make people aware of dangerous “back-alley” (ie, unregulated & usually illegal) abortion procedures using coat hangers, knitting needles, and other decidedly-not safe objects that often resulted in uterine perforations, infections, and death. Often used in a “we won’t go back to that” protest kind of way. 
> 
> “That poor girl from McAllen” is a reference to Rosaura (Rosie) Jimenez, of McAllen, Texas, who died in early October 1977 from an infection caught from such a procedure (though a coat hanger wasn’t used as far as I could tell). She couldn’t afford a legal procedure, so she sought out a cheaper, unlicensed provider to do it, who used dirty instruments. She is considered the first casualty of the Hyde Amendment (passed in 1976), which prevents Medicaid funds from being used to pay for an abortion. https://www.texasobserver.org/rosie-jimenez-abortion-medicaid/ 
> 
> In slightly-lighter notes: the Silver Lady was a real disco/club, though not in Dallas—it was a regular stop for my fiance’s parents in the Cleveland area and I wanted to pay homage to that, haha. The rearranging-furniture prank was also a real prank his dad was a victim of.


End file.
